by Dan Sociu

In the morning I wake up with fear of life,

At night I go to sleep with fear of death.

And it doesn’t seem to portend a good day,
doesn’t seem to portend anything at all
the morning when
accidentally looking back
you discover in your shit
burned matches

“how beautifully you used to pray when you were little, Duïu,
your elbows on the edge of your little bed,
your cute little bottom up”

— translated by Adam J. Sorkin, Dan Sociu, and Mihaela Niţă

by David J. Rothman

Just before the dawn the songbirds sing
As if they are so happy to be alive,
Mused some idiot who didn’t know anything
About how little birds survive.

It had been raining and blowing hard all night.
The courtyard chestnut creaked before the wind.
Inside, there was bourbon.  There was a fight.
We all made up, the crowd thinned.

Now the fingers of another dawn
Revealed familiar faces, enterprises.
We had pretended the past was done and gone,
Defeated by deals, by compromises.

Soon the sky was clear and crisp and blue
And we could smell the sea breeze flowing in,
Making the city sparkle as if new,
Subtle as a bulletin.

Still it was good, a moment in which a man
Might come to accept, or begin to understand
Something, in the way a cat inscrutably can
Understand or not understand

The well–worn coin of mortal landscapes
And an apartment’s overstuffed ashtrays,
Smeared glasses, song, and laughter, flickering out.

by David J. Rothman

It was a time of happiness.  Each day
The sky would open like a great blue wing.
At night rain fell, a gentle rain.  We walked,
Just to feel the water on our skin.
You could almost hear the pastures drinking.
And it seemed there was a wedding every weekend,
Musicians and flirtations and delight.

It was a time of joy and olives.  Old buildings
Were giving up their wasted walls for new.
Whatever we believed in we began.
Cracked plaster fell to laughter and our work.
The broken bones were slowly growing back
Together in the city’s injured ankle.

It was a time of wine and song.  The fact
That it was not could not destroy that fact.
For underneath a skepticism’s wheel
Is the road on which it rolls.  The cold cry “No!”
Is still a word, its desert still a place.
Somehow, together, we dreamed of milk
And honey, sun and working in the sun.

It was a time of happiness because
While each day seemed to be enough to fill
Itself, it also would go spilling over
Into the next, and the one before, connecting
Work to work, and word to word, and even
Hunger to its end.  Like dance, each one
Became much more than a way to get somewhere.

So come, dear dead philosophers, and pause.
Remember us as your beards curl in patterns
Of complex sleep on disputation’s pillow.
Arise from the wreckage of the world, return.

Close your books and recognize yourselves,
Return to your senses, I conjure you, join us.
Come singing from your raptures for the dead.
Come with your questioning eyes and tapping fingers,
Your crooked fingernails and curious spirits
Which dance in circling waves of commentary.
Stand murmuring, make holy convocation,
And swear to satiate your souls with fatness.
Then let me ask you this: if not now, when?
We bow to you, our bodies bent like the bow
That fires light back from nowhere into nothing,
Because this is the time for praise, a praise
That sings beyond the genius of denials,
A praise for that which is, where we must go
If we would say even a single word.

Listen: there still is time for happiness.
Help us to wipe the sorrow from our brows,
If only the better to know it for what it is.
Then lend us your hands, forge keys, unlock the fields,
The very fields where we have made mistakes,
Where everyone has made such sad mistakes.
For who would deny that he has made mistakes?
Do not give up, let us try to understand,
To draw a map in words instead of blood.

Then, my sages, we could drink water and
Consider here the life that makes more life.
Our hands are on those leafy branches now.
Respond to the living dust you call to praise
And inquire what must be done again today.
Let the dead instruct the living, the living the dead.
Help us to know what we already know —
That a time of happiness can come to be.

by David J. Rothman

The snake still walks on his belly,
The almond tree grows out of the ground
Like black iron and men and women still love
And fight in their petty ways.  That would be us, I guess,
Though I’ve never chained myself naked to a fence
And howled like a dog all night.
Still, I have done enough to prove myself human.
And so have you, my dear, so have you.
So many mistakes!  Tiny terrible wars.
And yet there still is nothing like the sun,
Perfect and therefore every day resistant to metaphor.
But you and I, we can grasp that solitude, let us
Be its sweet hungover mirrors despite our failures,
You with your rainbow skirt, me with the paper,
Laughing at last night’s arguments, who cares now?
Surely we are strong enough for that.  I say
Let the tenderness the sun cannot feel for living things
Become one of its manifestations because of us,
The miracle of being in a dying body
That will go down into the world.  You say “What?”

What I meant: life is not impatient, why should we be,
Just because we are the ones alive?  Yet impatient we are.
For example, where is my coffee?
This restaurant is slow, darling, slow,
Though as you point out that doesn’t bother the sparrows.
And so, and so, I apologize for my night terrors
And acknowledge that what there can be,
Beyond the dynamo of bitter memory,
Is a devotion to being alive, vitality redux.
Are we not most vividly, most perfectly alive?
Are we not the truth that any exile would profess?
Beyond this carefully imagined piazza the great green wave
Is filling the entire hemisphere again.
Give me your hand, let me feel its warmth.

Let us try to know each other in some way
That has never been thought of before,
In a way that might matter only to us
And will be known only to us.
Yes, that does mean I’ll take out the trash.
Ah, coffee at last, eggs, sun, newspaper, tomatoes!
Forgive me, forgive me, my veins are filled with stardust.
Let us brunch within this bright, irresistible flood
That will become itself again tomorrow forever.